Rex Smith: Thinking outside story lines

On the cover of a downstate tabloid the other day, Jeanine Pirro was waggling a rolling pin at shoulder level. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t planning to roll out some dough or award it to the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow.No, what it purported to show was the Republican candidate for New York state attorney general threatening her husband, Al Pirro, after he got his second speeding ticket in three months, adding more woe to what has been a pretty tough campaign season for Pirro.

But if you look very closely in the corner of the page, there’s this: “Post photo composite,” it says — meaning that Pirro, of course, never threatened anybody with a rolling pin. Some editor apparently thought it would be fun to use digital technology to illustrate the newspaper’s headline, “Doghouse.” It’s tempting here to launch into a diatribe about the tired gender roles implied by the notion of a wife going at her husband with a rolling pin, or to explore the political nuances of Pirro’s effort to overtake Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, who leads her in all the polls. But this incident exposes two breaches of journalistic ethics, one quite obvious and the other more complex.

First, it’s wrong to use a composite photo with a news story in a way that might lead a reader to think it’s real. Some people who glanced at that cover of the New York Post probably thought Jeanine Pirro really was wielding a rolling pin.

We know not to take some of this seriously — after all, that’s the same paper that used a PhotoShop program to depict weasels in suits as French delegates to the United Nations when Europeans were trying to slow the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There’s a line that reputable news organizations don’t cross. Rolling Pin Jeanine is on the wrong side of that line.

But the more significant issue is one that applies more broadly to political reporting, and there’s a good chance you’ll see it in this newspaper or in any of the most respected journals in the country. I’ve been guilty of this journalistic malpractice, both as a reporter and an editor, and so have plenty of other people who cover politics.

It’s the substitution of a simple story line in place of the nuances of what’s really going on. It’s the determination of journalists to see candidates as fulfilling particular expectations, playing roles that we assign them, rather than looking at each person we cover with fresh eyes and with questions about our own assumptions.

The most glaring example was the coverage of Howard Dean’s scream in 2004. When he let loose with a “yee-argh!” in the charged aftermath of his poor showing in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, it fulfilled the expectation of many political journalists that he was too intemperate to be president and that he wouldn’t be able to maintain his front-runner status. Dean never regained his footing as a candidate.

Many complex candidates are similarly reduced to little more than cartoon characters. When Al Gore delivered a campaign speech that wasn’t lively, it played into the conceit that he was a boring wonk — a depiction replaced these days by the line that he could have won if only he had summoned in 2000 the passion he now displays on climate change. Hillary Clinton’s every move is viewed as part of the story line of her presumed White House strategy. To be sure, these story lines often are rooted in fact. Maybe Dan Quayle misspelling “potato” was a valid story because he really wasn’t very smart. Mario Cuomo’s depiction as “Hamlet on the Hudson” emerged not just because he hesitated to run for president, but because he continually grappled over issues in his own mind, a Jesuitical habit that often impeded governmental decision-making.

Back to Jeanine Pirro: Her campaign has had so many gaffes that it’s tempting to depict her now as hapless. Her husband, who served time as a tax felon, keeps doing things (like speeding in a school zone) that make him newsworthy, and not in a good way. So while the rolling pin was a tabloid misdemeanor, it’s a worse crime if journalists covering Pirro now run every story about her through a sort of “what-will-this-dame-do-next” filter.

It’s not that we’re supposed to pretend candidates don’t do things that seem to match their characters or fulfill our expectations. But we just have to guard against letting our story lines get in the way of the real stories.